Unlocking Network Power: Inversity Reveals Optimal Strategies for Contagion Control

Networks across many different settings (e.g., social, economic, natural) are powerful tools for interventions due to the cascading impact of one person on others. In a new study, researchers examined the friendship paradox in networks, affirming the commonly held maxim that "your friends have more friends than you." Through mathematical and empirical analysis, the authors establish network properties related to friends of friends and introduce the concepts of ego-based and alter-based means. They also identify a new network property—inversity—that indicates which strategies are more effective in the success of interventions such as immunization against contagion, finding that inversity uniquely determines the best performing strategy. The study has implications for the effectiveness of these strategies in controlling epidemic spread in village networks, requiring fewer nodes to be immunized while maintaining privacy and adaptability to dynamic network conditions.

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Summarized from an article in PNAS, On the Friendship Paradox and Inversity: A Network Property with Applications to Privacy-Sensitive Network Interventions, by Kumara, V (Yale University), Krackhardt, D (Carnegie Mellon University), and Feld, S (Purdue University). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.

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